Qarshi davlat universiteti xorijiy tillar fakulteti ingliz tili va adabiyoti kafedrasi

 
 
Key Words and Expressions
 
Pillar, most-quoted, harsh, widespread, the Chartist movement, unbearable conditions, vices of 
the society, to reconcile, accusation, street sketches, exaggeration of facts, to unmask, hypocrisy. 
to draw cartoons, to outlive, prelude, reconciliation, realistic approach, pettifogging , virtuous 
person, hypocritical world, to hinder the development, spiritual degradation, the realm of beauty, 
cult of beauty,to be preoccupied, to be accused of immorality, innocent man, immoral life,urban 
manufacturing centers, brevity, social legislation, appreciate, outer form,at all costs, irregular 
meters, sharply contradicting characters, sarcasm, to expose the vices, human psychology, to 
breathe life into, the physiological aspects of a person’s speech, to bet with, to teach somebody 
manners ,to be introduced into society, social tracts, a forward-looking habit, evil aims, 
economic breach, to keep up traditions, stagnation of thought 
Text of lecture 6 
 
Victoria became queen of Great Britain in 1837. Her reign, the longest in English history, 
lasted until 1901. This period is called Victorian Age. 
The Victorian Age was characterized by sharp contradictions. In many ways it was an age of 
progress. The Victorian era marks the climax of England’s rise to economic and military 
supremacy. Nineteenth-century England became the first modern, industrialized nation. It ruled 
the most widespread empire in world history, embracing all of Canada, Australia, New Zealand, 
India, Pakistan, and many smaller countries in Asia, and the Caribbean. But internally England 
was not stable. There was too much poverty, too much injustice and fierce exploitation of man 
by man.
The workers fought for their rights. Their political demands were ex-pressed in the People’s 
Charter in 1833. The Chartist movement was
a revolutionary movement of the English 
workers, which lasted till 1848. The Chartists introduced their own literature. The Chartist 
writers tried their hand at different genres. They wrote articles, short stories, songs, epigrams, 
poems. Chartists (for example Ernest Jones “The Song of the Lower Classes”; Thomas Hood 
“The Song of the Shirt”) described the struggle of the workers for their rights, they showed the 
ruthless exploitation and the miserable fate of the poor. 
The ideas of Chartism attracted the attention of many progressive-minded people of the 
time. Many prominent writers became aware of the social injustice around them and tried to 
picture them in their works. The greatest novelists of the age were Charles Dickens, William 
Makepeace Thackeray, Charlotte Bronte, Elizabeth Gaskell, George Eliot.
These writers used the novel as a tool to protest against the evils in contemporary social and 
economic life and to picture the world in a realistic way. They expressed deep sympathy for the 
working people; described the unbearable conditions of their life and work. Criticism in their 
works was very strong, so some scholars called them Critical Realists, and the trend to which 
they belonged - Critical Realism. “Hard Times” by Charles Dickens and “Mary Barton” by 
Elizabeth Gaskell are the bright examples of that literature, in which the Chartist movement is 
described. The contribution of the writers belonging to the trend of realism in world literature is 
enormous. They created a broad picture of social life, exposed and attacked the vices of the 
contemporary society, sided with the common people in their passionate protest against 

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unbearable exploitation, and expressed their hopes for a better future. 
As 
for 
the poetry of that time,
 
English and American critics consider Alfred Tennyson, and Robert 
Browning to be the two great pillars on which Victorian poetry rested. Unlike the poetry of the 
Romantic Age, their poetry demonstrated the conservatism, optimism, and self-assurance that 
marked the poetry of the Victorian age. 
2.In 1824, a 14-year-old boy in Lincolnshire carved on a stone the words, “Byron is 
dead.” For the young Alfred Tennyson, something rare and wonderful had vanished from the 
world. His sense of loss was echoed by innumerable contemporaries throughout Europe; it has 
shaped literary history ever since. But Byron’s vivid afterlife also reflects a powerful cultural 
ambivalence in nineteenth-century Britain, which lies at the heart of what became Victorian 
literature. 
Byron’s death seemed and seems to mark the end of an era, which relegates the subsequent years 
before the ascent of Victoria – or at least before 1832, the date of the First Reform Bill – into an 
eerie twilight, mentioned largely as an interregnum, an awkward gap between the “Romantic” 
and “Victorian” epochs. That twilight obscures the many continuities between those two worlds. 
Thomas Carlyle, the single most influential “Victorian sage,” may seem to belong to a world 
very different from that of John Keats, yet the two men were born only a month apart. 
Throughout the shaping of Victorian literature, moreover, the figure of Byron remained very 
much alive. He was an inescapable and many-faceted icon – of poetry, of imagination, of excess, 
of daring, of dissolution, of rebellion, the emblem of an old order, the herald of a new. When 
Carlyle in Sartor Resartus (1831–3) struggled to imagine a new era of belief, he exhorted, “Close 
thy Byron, open thy Goethe.” 
The term ‘Victorian novel’ is at best an academic flag of convenience. Firstly, there is the 
problem of dates. Queen Victoria’s death in 1901 comes too long after her coronation in 1837 for 
the term ‘Victorian’ to have much precise significance, either for history or for literature. The 
first major Victorian novel, Dickens’ *Oliver Twist,appeared conveniently in 1837, in time for 
the future queen to be reading it on the night before her coronation, but for a decade after this the 
novels of *Dickens stoodlargely alone among a sea of minor work. Raymond Williams and 
Kathleen Tillotson saw the ‘true’ Victorian novel as starting some ten years later, in the literary 
ferment of the years 1847–8.1 In 1880 the death of *George Eliot coincided with changes in both 
the content and readership of fiction, and the genre’s major phase ends around that period. But 
the novels that followed reflect back on the earlier period in important ways. Then there is a 
question of the ‘Victorian consciousness’. The first readers of Dickens and George Eliot did not 
think of themselves as living in the ‘Victorian period’. ‘Victorian’ was first recorded in 1839, but 
it only gained general currency, largely as a term of disapproval, with the Edwardians. The 
British experienced the nineteenth century as a period of turbulent transition; although the term 
has been high-jacked by critics of the next era, they felt themselves to be inhabitants of the 
‘modern’ period, a word that appears some six hundred times in the book titles listed in The 
Nineteenth Century Short Title Catalogue for 1816–70.2 On the other hand,the major writers of 
the era grew up in the earlier years of the Regency and William IV, and had their imaginations 
shaped by the age of English Romanticism. The ‘nineteenth century’ might be seen to begin in 
1789, when the French Revolution opened up a fault line across the social, mental and religious 
structures of Europe, irreversibly changing ways of thinking and living, and laying the basis for 
the Romantic movement with its elevation of ‘common’ life, childhood and the emotions. The 
vision of Scott and Wordsworth lived on to culminate in the imaginative creations of George 
Eliot a decade after the mid-century. The creative tension within mid-Victorian literature comes 
from a cultural schizophrenia. If it was ‘modern’, materialist, factual, concerned with ‘things as 
they are’, it was also in many ways Romantic, fascinated with the ‘savage’ Gothic, 
melodramatic, idealistic.3 The ‘novel’ itself had little of the formal definition it has today. It was 
seen simply as a narrative form opposed to ‘romance’, a work of fiction dealing with the affairs 
of everyday life. As late as 1884 *Henry James could complain that, as a form, it ‘had no air of 

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having a theory, a conviction, a consciousness of itself behind it’.4 Prose fiction was written, 
read and reviewed as part of a continuous spectrum of literature dealing with the humanities and 
science. No one would have debated where Scott the historian ended and Scott the novelist 
began, or thought the question relevant. Criticism of the novel genre goes back to the early 
eighteenth century, and was widely discussed during the Victorian period.5 The subject of 
‘English literature’ was included in the syllabus of the University of London when it was 
founded in 1851.6 But studies of the novel were largely ethical, concerned with the ‘truth’ of 
literature, and Matthew Arnold’s famous definition of poetry in 1888 as ‘a criticism of life’7 
would have been applied equally to the novel. G. H. Lewes praised Charlotte Brontл’s *Villette 
(1853), although it showed a ‘contempt for conventions in all things, in style, in thought, even in 
the art of storytelling’, because it had ‘an astonishing power and passion...an influence of truth as 
healthful as a mountain breeze’.8 Literate readers were interested in the world in general, and 
even Dickens’ populist Household Words (1850–9) offered novels like Hard Times (1854) in a 
magazine that contained more non-fiction than fiction. In general, before about 1880, critics saw 
form as a means of representing reality; in the later century, ‘reality’ became increasingly the 
basis for artistic form. David Lodge has remarked that ‘novels burn facts as engines burn fuel’, 
and Victorian fiction consumed whole forests of miscellaneous information. But this brought 
with it a great diversity. By mid-century David Masson could identify thirteen sub-genres of 
novel by type, objective and subject.10 In the 1940s Leo J. Henkin summarized over 2,000 
novels reviewed in The Athenaeum between 1860 and 1900, and placed them in fifteen 
categories ranging from scientific discovery and religious debate to politics and colonial 
settlement.11 In an even more strenuous exercise, the librarian Myron Brightfield drew on a 
lifetime of reading Victorian novels for a social history of the period, at his death leaving a dense 
mosaic of extracts culled from some 2,000 novels, relating to over a hundred main topics. 
There can be no accurate account of the number of novels issued during this period, but a 
conservative estimate taken from The Publisher’s Circular between 1837 and 1901 suggests 
about 60,000 titles were published.13 This, however, excluded novels published only in 
periodicals, and most of those written for a mass readership appeared in ephemeral publications. 
There have been various attempts to map this vast sea. In Fiction with a Purpose (1967), the late 
Robert A. Colby related eight key Victorian titles to large clusters of contemporary fiction 
sharing the same interest. 
In 1999 the greatly extended third edition of the Cambridge Bibliography of 
English Literature included over 270 novelists writing between 1835 and 1900, but covered little 
‘popular’ fiction. John Sutherland’s invaluable Longman Companion to Victorian Fiction (1999) 
records nearly 900 novelists and gives brief synopses of nearly 500 works of fiction. But it 
makes no attempt to be comprehensive. Nor does this guide, which, with some exceptions, 
focuses on the writers who have selected themselves by their enduring literary quality, though 
these were not necessarily the most widely read novelists at the time. 
The ‘classic’ Victorian novel read and studied today was largely written by and for a 
specific, large but restricted middle-class readership, and consolidated middle-class cultural 
values. It is a myth that even Dickens was read by ‘everyone’ in the Victorian period. Sales of 
his early works were almost certainly exceeded by cheap plagiarisms recycling his fiction for 
popular consumption,15 and if he was delighted that his pioneering venture into the popular 
market, the twopenny Household Words, sold 40,000 copies, this circulation was dwarfed by 
comparable lower-middle class journals like The Family Herald, which had an estimated 
circulation of 300,000. When *Trollope boasted in 1870 that ‘novels are in the hands of all: from 
the Prime Minister, Mr Gladstone, down to the last-appointed scullery maid’, he omitted to say 
that the fiction pored over below stairs would have been very different to that found in the 
parlours of Downing Street. The amusing novel by the Mayhew brothers on The Greatest Plague 
in Life (i.e., the maidservant) featured the novel-reading Betsy, whose reading included the 
revealing titles The Black Pirate, The Heads of the Headless, Ada the Betrayed and Amy, or 

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Love and Madness, all actual penny-issue works published by Edward Lloyd. Betsy was reading 
in the late 1840s: average serving-girl literary tastes may have moved upwards by 1870, but not 
by that much. 
Yet the middle-class Victorian novel was nevertheless related to the revolution in printing 
and reading that affected everyone in early nineteenth-century Britain. Print had played an 
important role in previous social and religious developments in earlier periods of change. But 
what happened in early nineteenth-century England was different. The Industrial Revolution 
created cheap printing and papermaking, and rapid book distribution by rail, at a time when the 
reading population was rapidly expanding. As old social structures crumbled, new identities 
were forged through print. ‘I can hardly describe to you the effect of these books. They produced 
on me an infinity of new images and feelings...Who was I? What was I? Whence did I come? 
What was my destination?’17 The unlikely reader here is Frankenstein’s Monster. By showing 
that its rational identity was created not in the laboratory, of which we know nothing, but in its 
reading, of which we know every title, Mary Shelley in 1818 was reflecting the revolutionary 
changes that were transforming the societyof early nineteenth-century Britain, and at the same 
time recording her own creation of an independent identity through her reading and writing. 
William St Clair has documented in detail the unprecedented explosion in reading in England 
during this period, concluding that ‘it is clear that the Romantic period marks the start of a 
continuing, self-sustaining, expansion, a take-off in the nation’s reading equivalent to the take-
off in manufacturing production which accelerated at about the same time’.18 At mid-century, 
the pottery worker Charles Shaw, although living in cramped back-to-back accommodation, kept 
a space exclusively for his books, and felt as if he ‘entered into converse with presences who 
were living and breathing in that room’.19 But it was not just autodidacts whose lives were 
changed by reading. George Eliot envisaged the middle-class Tertius Lydgate stumbling on a 
cyclopaedia article, and ‘the world became new to him by a presentiment of endless processes 
filling the vast spaces planked out of his sight’.20 Dickens recalled for Forster a summer evening 
in Chatham, ‘the boys at play in the churchyard, and I sitting on my bed, reading as for life’, the 
world of books more real to him than anything in his material surroundings. Reading, in ways we 
have lost in an electronic age, was a creative act. For the emerging lower middle classes it was 
political. Benjamin Franklin’s dictum ‘Knowledge is Power’, above the woodcut of a hand press, 
became a Radical icon, and the extension of the vote in 1832 became inseparable from the fight 
against taxes on cheap periodical literature. Print still had ‘weight’ for the early nineteenth-
century reader. 
Although this was to change after Applegarth developed the rotary press in the 1840s, for much 
of the century printed matter was still relatively rare and expensive, and even penny periodicals 
were costly for the class of readers that bought them. Names and inscriptions in careful copper-
plate handwriting found today on the browning fly sheets of nineteenth-century popular editions 
bear witness to the way books were treasured .For their readers, words on the page still vibrated 
with their associationsfrom Shakespeare, Bunyan, and supremely, the King James English 
Bible.23There was still the link with the human voice, and reading aloud was a popular pastime 
in families, workplaces and concert halls. Dickens was one of the performers who extended the 
written word into public readings. Without today’s mental overload, untrammelled by academic 
boundaries,the printed word was savoured at a more leisurely pace. As the century developed 
John Stuart Mill deplored the effects of mass circulation newspapers on the reading public, and 
complained that this advance in literacy had brought ‘no increase in ability, and a very marked 
decrease in vigour and energy’ in mental activity.24 Ruskin and Carlyle also looked with alarm 
at the rapid spread of cheap reading that they saw threatening public taste. 
Meanwhile the ‘respectable’ novel, in particular through the central role of 
women writers within it, became a potent force shaping the ways of life and ethos of the new 
middle classes in the Victorian period.25 Many of these readers came from a social group that 
had been traditionally hostile to fiction, and for whom all reading apart from the Bible, 

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*Pilgrim’s Progress (1678, 1684) and devotional literature was a trivial detraction from the 
serious purposes of reading.26 ‘A g ainst the most pernicious reading in the world, against 
novels, let me particularly warn you,’ran a late eighteenth-century manual for ‘a young lady’; 
‘they poison the mind, they soften and pervert the understanding, and infuse a kind of false 
heroic sentiment, while they divest you of that which is really pure and virtuous.’27 Where 
novels were allowed, they gave instruction for‘real-life’ situations, like those of Fanny Burney or 
Jane Austen.28 That the middle-class readership came to accept a broader range of fiction was 
due above all to Sir Walter Scott, whose historical novels stood poised between fiction and 
chronicled fact. William St Clair has demonstrated that in the first decades of the century, more 
copies of Scott’s novels were sold than those of all other novelists combined (St Clair, p. 221). 
Scott not only framed his stories in an accurate historical setting and so made them ‘true’, he also 
wrote from the historical viewpoint of the common people, making his stories relevant to the 
lives of his readers. Working-class libraries that banned fiction allowed Scott’s novels. 
*Charlotte M. Yonge, tutored at home by her magistrate father, was allowed to read ‘a chapter a 
day of the Waverley novels, once she had read a portion of Goldsmith’s Rome or some equally 
solid book’.Scott prepared the way for the urban journalism of the 1830s, which discovered 
innumerable true histories swarming through the byways of the rapidly expanding cities. ‘There 
is not a street in London, but what may be compared to a large or small volume of intelligence, 
abounding in anecdote, incident and peculiarities,’ wrote the journalist Pierce Egan, Sr in *Life 
in London (1820–1, p. 24). Dickens, who as newspaper reporter wrote the pieces collected as 
Sketches by ‘Boz’ (1836), moved seamlessly from observation of London streets into their 
dramas and human narrative for Oliver Twist, the first major Victorian novel. 
But by 1870, when Trollope declared that the novel was a ‘rational amusement’,30 
reading with a moral purpose, he was already arguing against the tide. Novels had become ever 
cheaper, increasingly sold for their ‘sensation’ value and bought for casual recreation and 
railway reading. By the 1880s, writers like *George Meredith and *George Moore were
challenging the censorship of lending libraries that selected only those novels they thought 
suitable for family reading. There would be a case for ending this study then. But as we have 
noted, as the main Victorian period was passing, debates about its values were central to the 
work of Henry James, *Thomas Hardy, *George Gissing, Oscar Wilde and *Robert Louis 
Stevenson, and to end this study about 1880 would be like leaving a good play before seeing the 
last act. The cycle begun by the movement away from the early Gothic of James Hogg’s 
Confessions of a Justified Sinner (1824) and Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818, revised 1831) 
to the serious ‘social’ novel ends with the return to sensational forms in Stevenson’s The Strange 
Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886), Rider Haggard’s *She (1887) and H. G. Wells’ The War 
of the Worlds (1898). There is both continuation and change. Old imaginings return, but now 
reinterpreted by new insights into psychology, evolution and sociology,marking the transition 
from the ‘modern’ of the Victorians into the ‘Modernism’ of the next century.